Hidedaka Nakamura, a pioneer in the pre-modern Korean-Japanese relations history, believes that "the number of Japanese people coming and going with Chosun gradually increased through the repatriation of captives(piroin), and eventually the position of pirates(waegu) turned into the status of merchants." This means that pirates(waegu) and merchants are different. However, it was recently revealed that Nakamura was an imperial oriented historian. Therefore, it was judged that this argument also needed to be reviewed, whether or not it was affected by such ideological influence.
In this paper, this paper is named as the theory of Hidedaka Nakamura's "transition from pirates(waegu) to merchants“, and examined the range of the period between King Taejo and King Taejong in terms of paper. And in this paper, we have focused on the following three things.
First, did the invasion of weagu decrease as the number of Japanese people coming and going to Chosun increased? Second, were weagu and merchants different from each other? Third, what is the significance of the repatriation of captives(piroin) in early Chosun?
As a result of the review, the invasion of weagu also increased sharply at the time when Japanese people coming to Chosun increased rapidly. Since then, the pirates were intermittent, but continued to invade Chosun. In addition, in China at the same time as the Chosun Taejo-Taejong year, pirates were invading on a large scale almost every year. In other words, the pirates who invaded Chosun moved to China. From the historical records, it can be seen that pirates invading China are no different from beings invading Joseon. When they encountered a situation in which they were defended, they acted as merchants, and in the opposite situation, they returned to the position of pirates. In other words, they always had two aspects of a pirate and a merchant, just like the front and back sides of a coin, only different aspects depending on the region and situation. Therefore, it seems that the repatriation of captives(piroin) in the early Chosun period did not convert pirates into merchants, but ①moved the invading area, ②changed their existence according to the region and situation, such as 'pirates' in China and 'merchant' in Chosun.